Speeding up your searches

If you are like me, a good part of your online time is spend searching information on Google. In the majority of the cases, I am doing something that requires additional information, or looking for a website that can solve my problem.

Clearly Google saves me a lot of time, but it would also interesting to minimize the time necessary for my own Google searches. Here are some tips I think that minimize your search time. They have been very helpful in improving my search experience.

• Search for specific terms: most people spend a lot of time in the web because they search for terms that are too general. For example, if you are looking for music players for mp3 and you start searching just for mp3, most of your searches will be about general mp3 musics. If you really want to find pages faster, you need to be more specific with your terms.
• Use the cached pages: Google offers the great ability of looking the cache of a web page returned by the search. This have some advantages: first, you get faster to the result you are looking for. It is usually much faster to access Google pages than to access another web page in the web. So, using this idea you will cut your waiting time. Second, the cached page has you search terms highlighted. This means that you can very easily find the results on the page, instead of looking for them with the search feature of your browser.
• Read carefully the descriptions returned in the search result page: most people are so anxious to find a result that they click on the first page returned by Google. Although this works frequently, it can also be a time waste in many cases. It is better to consider each page, and find the ones that most closely relate to what you are searching for.

I think that searching content is similar to any other activity: the more you do it, the better you get at finding what you want. Using some of these tips I was able to reduce my search time and therefore have been able to spend more time doing what I like.